John Passos - Manhattan transfer

Through the dream she is stitching white fingers beckon. The white tulle shines too bright. Red hands clutch suddenly out of the tulle, she cant fight off the red tulle all round her biting into her, coiled about her head. The skylight’s blackened with swirling smoke. The room’s full of smoke and screaming. Anna is on her feet whirling round fighting with her hands the burning tulle all round her.

Ellen stands looking at herself in the pierglass in the fitting room. The smell of singed fabrics gets stronger. After walking to and fro nervously a little while she goes through the glass door, down a passage hung with dresses, ducks under a cloud of smoke, and sees through streaming eyes the big workroom, screaming girls huddling behind Madame Soubrine, who is pointing a chemical extinguisher at charred piles of goods about a table. They are picking something moaning out of the charred goods. Out of the corner of her eye she sees an arm in shreds, a seared black red face, a horrible naked head.

‘Oh Mrs Herf, please tell them in front it’s nothing, absolutely nothing… I’ll be there at once,’ Madame Soubrine shrieks breathlessly at her. Ellen runs with closed eyes through the smoke-filled corridor into the clean air of the fitting room, then, when her eyes have stopped running, she goes through the curtains to the agitated women in the waiting room.

‘Madame Soubrine asked me to tell everybody it was nothing, absolutely nothing. Just a little blaze in a pile of rubbish… She put it out herself with an extinguisher.’

‘Nothing, absolutely nothing,’ the women say one to another settling back onto the Empress Josephine sofas.

Ellen goes out to the street. The fireengines are arriving. Policemen are beating back the crowds. She wants to go away but she cant, she’s waiting for something. At last she hears it tinkling down the street. As the fireengines go clanging away, the ambulance drives up. Attendants carry in the folded stretcher. Ellen can hardly breathe. She stands beside the ambulance behind a broad blue policeman. She tries to puzzle out why she is so moved; it is as if some part of her were going to be wrapped in bandages, carried away on a stretcher. Too soon it comes out, between the routine faces, the dark uniforms of the attendants.

‘Was she terribly burned?’ somehow she manages to ask under the policeman’s arm.

‘She wont die… but it’s tough on a girl.’ Ellen elbows her way through the crowd and hurries towards Fifth Avenue. It’s almost dark. Lights swim brightly in night clear blue like the deep sea.

Why should I be so excited? she keeps asking herself. Just somebody’s bad luck, the sort of thing that happens every day. The moaning turmoil and the clanging of the fireengines wont seem to fade away inside her. She stands irresolutely on a corner while cars, faces, flicker clatteringly past her. A young man in a new straw hat is looking at her out of the corners of his eyes, trying to pick her up. She stares him blankly in the face. He has on a red, green, and blue striped necktie. She walks past him fast, crosses to the other side of the avenue, and turns uptown. Seven thirty. She’s got to meet some one somewhere, she cant think where. There’s a horrible tired blankness inside her. O dear what shall I do? she whimpers to herself. At the next corner she hails a taxi. ‘Go to the Algonquin please.’

She remembers it all now, at eight o’clock she’s going to have dinner with Judge Shammeyer and his wife. Ought to have gone home to dress. George’ll be mad when he sees me come breezing in like this. Likes to show me off all dressed up like a Christmas tree, like an Effenbee walking talking doll, damn him.

She sits back in the corner of the taxi with her eyes closed. Relax, she must let herself relax more. Ridiculous to go round always keyed up so that everything is like chalk shrieking on a blackboard. Suppose I’d been horribly burned, like that girl, disfigured for life. Probably she can get a lot of money out of old Soubrine, the beginning of a career. Suppose I’d gone with that young man with the ugly necktie who tried to pick me up… Kidding over a banana split in a soda fountain, riding uptown and then down again on the bus, with his knee pressing my knee and his arm round my waist, a little heavy petting in a doorway… There are lives to be lived if only you didn’t care. Care for what, for what; the opinion of mankind, money, success, hotel lobbies, health, umbrellas, Uneeda biscuits… ? It’s like a busted mechanical toy the way my mind goes brrr all the time. I hope they havent ordered dinner. I’ll make them go somewhere else if they havent. She opens her vanity case and begins to powder her nose.

When the taxi stops and the tall doorman opens the door, she steps out with dancing pointed girlish steps, pays, and turns, her cheeks a little flushed, her eyes sparkling with the glinting seablue night of deep streets, into the revolving doors.

As she goes through the shining soundless revolving doors, that spin before her gloved hand touches the glass, there shoots through her a sudden pang of something forgotten. Gloves, purse, vanity case, handkerchief, I have them all. Didn’t have an umbrella. What did I forget in the taxicab? But already she is advancing smiling towards two gray men in black with white shirtfronts getting to their feet, smiling, holding out their hands.

Bob Hildebrand in dressing gown and pyjamas walked up and down in front of the long windows smoking a pipe. Through the sliding doors into the front came a sound of glasses tinkling and shuffling feet and laughing and Running Wild grating hazily out of a blunt needle on the phonograph.

‘Why dont you park here for the night?’ Hildebrand was saying in his deep serious voice. ‘Those people’ll fade out gradually… We can put you up on the couch.’

‘No thanks,’ said Jimmy. ‘They’ll start talking psychoanalysis in a minute and they’ll be here till dawn.’

‘But you’d much better take a morning train.’

‘I’m not going to take any kind of a train.’

‘Say Herf did you read about the man in Philadelphia who was killed because he wore his straw hat on the fourteenth of May?’

‘By God if I was starting a new religion he’d be made a saint.’

‘Didnt you read about it? It was funny as a crutch… This man had the temerity to defend his straw hat. Somebody had busted it and he started to fight, and in the middle of it one of these street-corner heroes came up behind him and brained him with a piece of lead pipe. They picked him up with a cracked skull and he died in the hospital.’

‘Bob what was his name?’

‘I didnt notice.’

‘Talk about the Unknown Soldier… That’s a real hero for you; the golden legend of the man who would wear a straw hat out of season.’

A head was stuck between the double doors. A flushfaced man with his hair over his eyes looked in. ‘Cant I bring you fellers a shot of gin… Whose funeral is being celebrated anyway?’

‘I’m going to bed, no gin for me,’ said Hildebrand grouchily.

‘It’s the funeral of Saint Aloysius of Philadelphia, virgin and martyr, the man who would wear a straw hat out of season,’ said Herf. ‘I might sniff a little gin. I’ve got to run in a minute… So long Bob.’

‘So long you mysterious traveler… Let us have your address, do you hear?’

The long front room was full of ginbottles, gingerale bottles, ashtrays crowded with halfsmoked cigarettes, couples dancing, people sprawled on sofas. Endlessly the phonograph played Lady… lady be good . A glass of gin was pushed into Herf’s hand. A girl came up to him.

‘We’ve been talking about you… Did you know you were a man of mystery?’

‘Jimmy,’ came a shrill drunken voice, ‘you’re suspected of being the bobhaired bandit.’